Now, when you look at the SDK, you’ll find a new option on ‘Conversation’ to ‘markAllMessagesAsRead’. Even if messages are still on the server side and haven’t been downloaded by a client, you can mark them as read. This minor product update is especially helpful for iOS users because it offers a quick way to clean up badge counts.

3 Use Cases for the “Mark All as Read” Update

We see three basic use cases for this feature:

Introducing a Support Rep into a Conversation: Messaging makes the customer conversation history more accessible than other means of communication. But when you introduce a new support agent or supervisor to a long, existing conversation, unread messages can get out of hand. Now, you can quickly mark them all as read and avoid clogging up badge/unread message counts.

Filling Out Group Chats: In the same way a retailer or airline might add a support agent to a conversation, brands running events, communities or interest groups on the Layer platform might face message notification challenges with group chat. When new members are added to group chats, they don’t want to receive a flood of notifications. This new update lets them quickly mark messages as read and avoid the clogged badge count.

Miscellaneous Catching Up: Some people just want to live at inbox zero. Even if you haven’t actually read all of your messages, there are times when you might want to give users the ability to zero out the message count anyway. Whatever your specific reason might be, you now have the ability to remove any notifications for unread messages.

“Mark All as Read” isn’t the biggest update in we’ve shipped, but we wanted to address a common problem many of our customers were facing.